Norman L. Knight | |
|---|---|
| Born | Norman Louis Knight (1895-09-21)21 September 1895 |
| Died | 19 April 1972(1972-04-19) (aged 76) Adventist Hospital Takoma Park, Maryland, US |
| Occupation |
|
| Nationality | American |
| Period | 1937–1967 |
| Genre | Science fiction, Fantasy |
| Spouse |
Marie Sarah Knight (née Yenn)
(m. 1921) |
Norman Louis Knight (September 21, 1895 – April 19, 1972) was an American chemist and writer of fantasy and science fiction.[1]
Biography
Knight was born in St. Joseph, Missouri on September 21, 1895, at 2109 Messanie Road. His father Louis Ruthven Knight was a druggist, and the family - including his mother Mary E. Knight (née Stauber) - lived over his drugstore.
Knight joined the US Army in 1917 and was sent to France, where his service was interrupted by a bout of influenza. Upon recovering, he was assigned to carry messages between commands via horseback with the Signal Corps. After the war, he joined the nascent National Weather Service in Davenport, Iowa, where he met his future wife Marie Sarah Yenn. They had one child, a girl named Paula Marie.
Writings
Knight's writing career was relatively abbreviated, consisting almost entirely of stories published in Astounding between 1937 and 1942; these included two serialized novellas. He briefly emerged from retirement between 1965 and 1967 with the novel A Torrent of Faces, co-written with James Blish. Very modern in style and outlook compared to Knight's Golden Age fiction, the novel saw numerous reprints, and was featured in the Ace Science Fiction Specials line.[2] It remains Knight's most prominent work. Several of its chapters, published independently in Galaxy Magazine in 1965 as the novelette "The Shipwrecked Hotel", were nominated for the 1966 Nebula Award.
Despite a relatively successful career in Golden Age magazines, Knight never achieved prominence, and his work rapidly fell into obscurity. A rare contemporary critical notice was provided by Edmond Hamilton and Leigh Brackett, who praised his 1939 story Saurian Valedictory as "one of the really great stories on alien mentality", while lamenting that it was "a brilliant achievement, and nobody seems to have heard of it, or him. It was an attempt to depict a reptilian civilization before Man. It succeeded triumphantly; the values were all so different, the psychology".[3]
Bibliography
Novels
- A Torrent of Faces (novel, 1967) with James Blish
Short fiction
- "Frontier of the Unknown" (novella, Astounding, July-August 1937)
- "Isle of the Golden Swarm" (short story, Astounding, June 1938)
- "Saurian Valedictory" (novelette, Astounding, January 1939)
- "Bombardment in Reverse" (short story, Astounding, February 1940)
- "The Testament of Akubii" (short story, Astounding, June 1940)
- "Crisis in Utopia" (novella, Astounding, July-August 1940)
- "Short-Circuited Probability" (short story, Astounding, September 1941)
- "Fugitive from Vanguard" (short story, Astounding, January 1942)
- "Kilgallen's Lunar Legacy" (short story, Astounding, August 1942)
- "Once in a Blue Moon" (short story, Future Combined with Science Fiction, August 1942)
- "The Shipwrecked Hotel" (novelette, Galaxy Magazine, August 1965; )
- "The Piper of Dis" (novelette, Galaxy Magazine, August 1966)
- "To Love Another" (novelette, Analog, April 1967)
References
Notes
- ^ Clute and Nicholls 1995, p. 674.
- ^ ISFDB bibliography
- ^ "Tangent Online Presents: An Interview with Leigh Brackett & Edmond Hamilton". Archived from the original on 2016-08-19. Retrieved 2013-09-12.
Bibliography
- Clute, John and Peter Nicholls. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 1995. ISBN 0-312-13486-X.
External links
- Norman L. Knight at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
